Mastodawn

Martin Escardo Apr 29, 2024

Why do most papers in CS conferences say "novel" repeatedly now a days?

I find this extremely irritating.

It is up to me, as the reader, to judge whether this is novel or not.

Please tell me what you have done, rather than telling me that (you think) it is novel.

Don't tell me that your results are important, or surprising, or anything like that. I will judge the importance or surprise or novelty.

It is not like if you didn't tell me it is important (if indeed it is) I wouldn't notice.

And if it is not novel, why would you be submitting it to the conference, anyway?

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ohad Apr 29, 2024

@MartinEscardo @zyang and @jonmsterling said it: it's written for the reviewers. It's no longer the case that a specialist paper is guaranteed, nor even likely, to get 2 or more reviewers who have tried something like this before and will form an opinion about novelty from an expert position.

So when writing A is novel, and B is novel, and C is novel, the expert says 'yes, yes, yes', and the non expert says 'I'm not an expert, but A,B, and C seem novel' and feel comfortable accepting the submission.

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Martin Escardo Apr 29, 2024

@ohad @zyang @jonmsterling

Is that supposed to justify how papers should be written, or that the conference publication system in CS is rotten?

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ohad

@MartinEscardo @zyang @jonmsterling I'm not justifying any aspect of the peer review system, whether it's conference CS, journal CS, journal philosophy, etc.

I'm offering an explanation for why it might be like so, and you can form your opinion as to whether it explains the phenomena you observe better than other hypotheses, parsimonious, etc, maybe challenge it, etc.